5 Incredible Things We've Already Discovered thanks to the James Webb Telescope

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the James web Space Telescope or jwst left Earth for orbit on Christmas of 2021 after months of positioning itself into a stable orbit and carefully aligning all of the components the telescope's first image was released to the public on July the 11th 2022 and it officially entered service the very next day it's been less than 2 years since then but jwst has proven to be an endless source of incredible discoveries from neverbe seen objects within our own solar system to distant galaxies that threaten to break our understanding of the universe today we're going to be looking at five of the incredible things that we've already discovered thanks to [Music] jwst in July of 2022 the first images came back from jwst and they immediately received a lot of attention these were the most highresolution images of distant galaxies that had ever been seen and it was difficult not to be in awe of the stark contrast between these new images and those from previous telescopes like Hubble however about a week after those images came out researchers noticed something peculiar in one of them the image showed a red dot that was suspiciously bright it wasn't unusual for a Galaxy to be so red or so bright but it should not have been both the redness is the result of something called red shift which is caused by the expansion of the universe as the universe expands outwards light gets stretched out causing it to appear more more red to us this color can be used to determine the distance of the light source from us and by extension its age just like red shift can tell us the age of galaxies their brightness is used to indicate their size as a general rule the brighter a Galaxy appears the more stars it's got and these galaxies were big comparable in size to our own Milky Way according to researcher IA L I ran the analysis software on the little pin brick and it spat out two numbers distance 13.1 billion light years Mass 100 billion stars and a nearly spat out my coffee according to the standard model of cosmology this should have been completely impossible and the next day six more impossible galaxies were found the researchers began referring to them as Universe Breakers because they threatened to destroy our entire understanding of the formation of the universe since then even more impossible Galaxies have been discovered these galaxies are extremely old having originated only a few hundred million years after the origin of the universe now that by itself totally fine as we know there were galaxies already forming that early but they shouldn't have been as big as they are our understanding of the evolution of galaxies is that they started off small then these small dwarf galaxies combined to form larger galaxies according to the currently accepted theories this process wouldn't have even begun until one or two billion years after the big bang hundreds of millions of years after the newly observed galaxies were already fully matured not only does this timeline not make sense based on the current model but there shouldn't have been enough gas available to form all of these Stars oford according to L to produce these galaxies so quickly you almost need all the gas in the universe to turn into stars at near 100% efficiency and that is very hard which is the scientific term for impossible though scientists have yet to reach a consensus a couple of theories have been floated to try and explain how these objects could have come into being one theory is that they might not be massive galaxies at all but rather quazars a quazar is a galactic nucleus powered by a super massive black hole the most powerful quazars are thousands of times brighter than the Milky Way so it is possible that a quazar that was appropriately sized for how early in the universe it Formed could be bright enough to appear to us as a massive Galaxy the other possibility is a phenomenon known as bursty star formation in which groups of stars suddenly spring to life in a sudden burst rather than through the slow and gradual process through which most stars are normally born these rapid bursts of starb births are a phenomenon that have been observed at various locations around the universe with the first observations going back to years before the jwst even launched so this isn't just some technically possible theory that was thrown together to force the new data to fit into our current cosmological model of course that still does not fully answer the question of how these galaxies could be so massive even if the stars formed at a much faster rate their calculated Mass still should not be possible the key is that while a Galaxy's brightness has a strong correlation with its mass it's not entirely causal according to researcher Claude Andre fer gier most of the light in a galaxy comes from the most massive stars because more massive stars burn at a higher speed they are shorter lived so the brightness of a galaxy is more directly related to how many stars it has formed in the last few million years than the mass of the Galaxy as a whole now taking that into account if the impossible galaxies experienced a bursty star formation of massive stars the galaxy could have shined much brighter than it would be expected to relative to its mass it's not just jst's discovery of massive early galaxies that have called our understanding of cosmology into question but the discovery of early super massive black holes as well in April of 2023 jwsd discovered Sear's 1019 the oldest known black hole in the universe at the time and about 10 million times the mass of our sun this black hole was a lot smaller than other super massive black holes from the early Universe however it was also much older dating back to about 570 million years after the big bang while it may be small in comparison to other black holes that can contain billions of times the mass of our sun it was still far larger than anything that should have existed that early in the universe and it wasn't alone either a few months after the discovery of SE 1019 jwsd discovered another black hole at the center of the Galaxy gnz11 this one was even smaller only 1.6 million times the mass of our sun but it was also even older the new oldest known black hole in the universe goes back to 400 million years after the big bang in the case of both of these black holes that shouldn't have been nearly enough time to accumulate that amount of mass under the traditional model black holes are the remnants of massive stars that have burnt out and died and then collapsed in on themselves they then accrete matter around them and grow in size getting this much mass in such a short time shouldn't have been possible and it has led to a few new theories on how these black holes came into being one the is that all of that star nonsense was bypassed completely and matter directly collapsed into a black hole this would require an incredible amount of matter piling up in an early Galaxy to collapse into the black hole far more matter than would be likely but as unlikely as it may be it's not necessarily impossible it would also be the fastest way to create a black hole thus providing long enough for it to have accumulated so much total mass in such a short time another theory requires the existence of population three stars these were first theorized in the 1960s as having existed in the early universe and some indirect evidence hints that they may have in fact existed but there's no direct evidence or observation to support that idea yet these Stars would have been made up entirely of hydrogen and helium completely devoid of heavier elements such a star could burn quickly explode and then leave behind a black hole that may have quickly gained Mass sometimes at a faster than stable rate now this is viewed as the most likely of these theories especially since indirect evidence hinting at the existence of population three stars already existed the final theory is that these newly discovered black holes could have begun as primordial black holes primordial black holes are comparatively tiny objects that are theorized to have existed immediately after the big bang in some theories these black holes even predate the Big Bang if that turned out to be the correct Theory it would certainly raise more questions than it answered but it would have given these early black holes enough time to accumulate the large masses observed by jwst groundbased telescopes had hinted at the existence of something unusual floating around in the Orion Nebula for years and the jwst finally got a look at it in 2023 what researchers discovered was more than a little surprising as it again threatened to call into question everything we thought we knew about the formation of stars and other solar systems jwst identified 40 pairs of Jupiter Mass binary objects also known as jumbos despite having Jupiter in the name that is just to indicate that size rather than to claim that these objects are planets after all you are probably a Great Dane Mass object but you are not a Great Dane you are a human probably similarly despite having a mass comparable to Jupiter the jumbos don't appear to be planets or stars for that matter they appear to be an entirely new thing that somewhere in between the two these binary pairs of objects seem to be floating freely throughout the irion nebula not actually orbiting anything this raises questions not only about what they are but also where the hell they came from According to gas physics an object as small as Jupiter shouldn't be able to form on its own it can certainly form as part of a solar system but physics states that jumbos couldn't have formed from gas clouds independent of the formation of other celestial bodies if these were created through a similar mechanism to Star formation there clearly is some missing elements we have yet to identify that explains how something so small could have come into being but what if these objects were created through the same process that makes planets for many of the jumbos that would be fine as hundreds of them were discovered in the Orion Nebula however it's those 40 binary pairs that make this a less satisfying solution individual planets get kicked out of solar systems from time to time and there are plenty of rogue planets roaming the galaxies this is generally a very chaotic process so it's unlikely that two planets would be ejected from a solar system at the same time even if that did happen how would those two planets be ejected in such a way that through all the chaos they managed to remain St to one another as a binary pair it's the sort of thing that is probably not impossible but it is vanishingly unlikely it's certainly not something we should expect to discover happened 40 times in one small area of the universe all in a very small window of time thus far we don't have any good answers to the questions being raised by the discovery of jumbos since we can't even figure out if they are closer to stars or planets they may wind up representing an entirely new category of celestial bodies all we know for sure is that this Discovery means there is much more about the formation of stars and solar systems that we have left to learn when we think of discoveries from the jwst we tend to think of celestial bodies in the most distant expanses of the universe however the telescope has shown its ability to make incredible new discoveries within our own solar system as well even if completely by accident it began with the calibration of JW's mid infrared instrument or Mir the telescope was pointed at the main asteroid belt that lies between Mars and Jupiter with the goal of testing some of Mary's filters but these tests were initially considered a failure by the calibration team the images were centered on asteroid 10920 but the asteroid was too bright for the necessary calibrations to be performed rather than just writing off this exercise as a waste of time the team instead decided to use the data from Mary to establish and test a new method of calculating an object's orbit and size it was while doing those calculations on asteroid 10920 that the team noticed the images taken by Mir revealed the presence of a previously unseen asteroid in the telescope's field of view most notably that asteroid was very small estimated at only 100 to 200 M long or about the size of the Washington Monument this was the smallest object observed by jwst and there's much more to the Discovery than just it being a small floating Rock the main asteroid belt contains remnants from the formation of the solar system allowing it to act almost like a fossil record for our solar systems Evolution over 100 ,000 asteroids have been found within the belt thus far and our current models predict the existence of many small asteroids some barely larger than a person a great deal could be learned about the birth of our solar system from examining these objects but small asteroids have not been studied nearly as much as their larger counterparts for one simple reason they're really hard to see based on this accidental Discovery it's believed that jwst will continue to make chance discoveries of previously unknown asteroids within our solar system unfortunately while we know these discoveries could have huge implications for our understanding of the solar system exactly what those implications are remains unknown in the future jwsd will undertake dedicated observations to study asteroids smaller than 1 kilometer in size so I'll have to wait and see what is learned when researchers deliberately study these objects rather than just accidentally noticing their existence back in 2015 the Kepler space telescope discovered the exoplanet k218b the planet orbits the red dwarf star k218 in the constellation Leo only 124 light years away this has become one of the most important exoplanets especially following a 2019 spectroscopic analysis that showed the presence of water vapor in the atmosphere it was the first time water vapor was seen in the atmosphere of an exoplanet that wasn't a hot Jupiter the informal name for gas giant planets that have high surface temperatures due to their proximity to the Stars they orbit instead k218b orbits within it planet's habitable zone and has an average temperature of only about 20° C colder than the earth it is as of yet unknown if this is a rocky planet like Earth but it has an atmosphere rich in hydrogen and is believed to be covered by an ocean of liquid water k218b has been considered so important that a new category of planets called a hean planet has been defined by its very characteristics despite already being heavily studied in 2023 the jwsd was able to make a new and potentially groundbreaking discovery regarding k218b although it was a mix of good new and bad news the bad news was that the atmosphere was shown to be made up of only 0 1% water vapor this doesn't rule out the possibility of large quantities of water on the planet as it's possible that the spectrographic image from jwsd was only of the dry Stratosphere on Earth our troposphere is 0.3 to 0.4% water vapor while the stratosphere only contains a few water molecules per million molecules of air however it was the other gases discovered that were far more exciting there was plenty of hydrogen which we already knew and the presence of carbon dioxide and methane were not particularly unusual either however jwst also detected the presence of dimethyl sulfide or DMS this particular compound is extremely important because here on Earth anyway it is a bio signature all DMS on Earth is created by life with most of it being created by phytoplankton that doesn't mean this has to be the case on every planet and there could be some unknown mechanism causing it to exist on k218b and it certainly warrants more research before for jumping to conclusions additional research would be needed anyway as the initial results from jwsd aren't completely conclusive the proportion of DMS in the atmosphere was very low so additional testing is required to confirm the results at the time of writing a follow-up investigation using jwss Mir spectrograph should have already been conducted but the findings of that mission have yet to be published of course it's worth noting that even if k8b is capable of and potentially supporting microbial life it is hardly an earth to candidate that's also a pretty big if since we don't even know if the planet has a surface that you could stand on and it's largely believed that life would not be able to form on a gas planet and that's only one of many potential unknowns that could prevent life from being a possibility on this planet still the jwsd reporting the presence of DMS in the planet's atmosphere remains an incredibly exciting development it's far too early to make bold claims about microbial life existing on the planet but early evidence suggests that it is a very real possibility that we can't R out just [Music] yet
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Channel: Sideprojects
Views: 1,139,000
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Keywords: megaprojects, construction, engineering, projects, sideprojects, james webb space telescope, nasa telescope, nasa space telescope, james webb, universe today, exoplanet, nasa webb, nasa, webb
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Length: 16min 10sec (970 seconds)
Published: Sun Mar 31 2024
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